The Grand Old Republican Party Is Over

Lawrence Hunter
, ContributorI write about the intersection of economics and politics.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Barack Obama is the most radical president in American history and one of the most incompetent. He openly espouses fascism—albeit fascism tarted up as Socialism American Style—more interventionist and oppressive government, and more war; he made George W. Bush’s economic and fiscal calamities worse, and the rest of the world hates us more today than when Bush the Younger left office.

President Obama should have been defeated easily in his quest for a second term. Instead, the president’s Republican opponent in 2012 actually received fewer votes than his Republican opponent did in 2008 when Mr. Obama was a little known, unaccomplished junior senator from the Midwest. Moreover, Obama’s Republican challenger in 2012 won only one of nine so-called battleground states. In only two battleground states (one of which he won) did he receive a larger percentage of the vote than he did nationwide in the overall popular vote (47.9 percent), which brings into question whether Obama’s Republican opponent ever really was competitive in most of these states.

It’s pathetic—and prophetic: The Republican Party is over.

Make no mistake, however, for all the GOP’s debilities, Republicans still could have won this election if they:

had they chosen a true pro-growth candidate who would have run unashamedly in the manner of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp;

had Karl Rove not taken over the GOP financial operation, suckered donors out of more than $300 million and then squandered it in a self-enriching power grab for himself and his cronies;

had the Establishment GOP not treated Ron Paul and his supporters like dirt;

had the Republican Party more closely aligned itself with the materializing peace-and-liberty plurality in America that is emerging from all political groupings and calling for an end to perpetual war, the elimination of crony capitalism, an end to the oppressive national-security state, and a return to personal liberty, sound money and personal responsibility;

had the Party of Lincoln embraced the necessity to reduce unwarranted wealth and income inequality and explained to voters (as Reagan and Kemp would have) that forced redistribution by the government only makes inequality worse; that economic growth and free markets are the greatest leveling forces in the universe, not the source of growing inequality, a myth people are indoctrinated to believe by the statists controlling both political parties.

But they didn’t, and now they can’t. The self-inflicted wound it too deep to bind, the bleeding too profuse to staunch.

The last straw was the Republican Establishment’s giving the back of its hand to Ron Paul, one of the party’s wise old men, and then effectively ejecting its libertarian brethren from the party. On top of which, Republican acolytes used such incendiary and loony-sounding rhetoric on the so-called social issues that it scared the bejesus out of many people who held less extreme views on social issues than the orthodoxy ordained by the GOP deacons.

The Republican Party now faces an insolvable conundrum. Continuing aggressively to promote government intervention into people’s personal lives will further alienate libertarians and moderates. (For the first time in history, Gallup finds a majority of Americans, 52 percent, saying the government should not favor any particular set of values in society, while 44 percent believe it should promote traditional values). Yet, simply moderating its views on the social issues will be insufficient to entice libertarians back into the fold as long as the core of the party remains empire builders and warmongers, big spenders, paper-money inflationists and crony capitalists. And even if the GOP wise guys figured out how to lure libertarians and moderates back, it runs the risk of disaffecting the largest faction of the party, the social conservatives, and leaving them sitting on their hands rather than marking ballots on Election Day.

The only other route open to the GOP is to try to move toward the Democrats on taxation, immigration, entitlements and economic intervention in an effort to appeal to the 60 percent of Democrats who self identify themselves as “moderates” or “conservatives”. But, that won’t work either. Democrats won’t leave their party, even once they recognize its policies aren’t working, as long as all the opposition party offers is a pale imitation of the same policies. Indeed, Democrats agitated by the coming failure of their party’s policies are more likely to reject a pale Republican imitation and instead double down on failed Democratic policies, believing they have failed only because they haven’t really been tried. F.A. Hayek predicted such behavior. The perverse result would be not a movement of sufficient Democrats into the Republican Party to carry the day for the GOP but stronger support, at least temporarily, among Democrats for even more heavy-handed government intervention at every turn.

The GOP is not quite in checkmate but it is on the horizon, as Republicans have entered into what chess masters call Zugzwang, a situation in which every move available to a player simply worsens his position. But, this terminal diagnosis for the GOP is not good news for the Democrats, especially when Obama’s policies begin to fail, which they inevitably will. Although identity politics appears to be in the ascendancy today—hence all the punditry about demographics being destiny—voting one’s skin color, ethnic background, religion, gender or sexual orientation will not survive the coming disillusion and disaffection among Democrats that will set in with a vengeance when the failure of Democratic policies no longer can be blamed on George W. Bush and the hapless Republican Party.

People of all “identities” (except the sociopaths who tend to rise to the top of government) want the same things for themselves and their families: security, prosperity and freedom to live their lives as they see fit. The disagreement is about how to achieve these objectives. Both parties now offer the same failed interventionist solutions wrapped up in red and blue packages to give them brand identity—more government intervention in the economy, more government intervention in people’s personal lives and more government intervention in the affairs of foreign countries. The smaller the real distinctions between the two parties become, the more the minor distinctions are hyped with incendiary rhetoric and laced with the invective of identity politics.

So, don’t be misled by the euphoria within the Democratic Party in the aftermath of last week’s election. It masks the fact that, just like its Republican duopolistic partner in crime, the Democratic Party is beginning to split apart along the same fissure that rends the Republican Party, i.e., along the lines of the peace-and-liberty plurality that currently is trapped inside both political parties and wandering in the wilderness among Independents.

The Republican Party is dying and will be unable to sustain itself over the long run in its current form. The Democratic Party is critically ill as well, currently in temporary remission but terminal nonetheless.

America is not a 50/50 nation; that misperception is what the French call a trompe l'oeils, an optical illusion reflective of the two-party duopoly in which we are trapped. America is actually a 4-quarter nation trapped inside a rotting two-party duopoly. Statistical analyses of voter surveys identify four basic clusters of voters located within a two-dimension policy space measured along two separate axes: an economic-intervention axis and a personal/social-intervention axis. According to a Reason-Rupe survey, 24 percent of Americans are “Libertarian” (both economically and personally/socially non-interventionist); 20 percent are “Communitarian” (both economically and personally/socially interventionist); 28 percent are “Conventional Liberals” (economically interventionist and personally/socially non-interventionist); and 28 percent are “Conventional Conservatives” (economically non-interventionist and personally/socially interventionist). A more precise description would add the third relevant dimension of intervention—intervention into the affairs of foreign nations—but that is for another column, and it does not alter the point.

Elements of the peace-and-liberty plurality are buried within all four groupings. The fissure rent by this plurality as it escapes partisan captivity will be the fault line around which a party realignment occurs in America. As the policies of the two-party duopoly continue to fail, the exodus of the peace-and-liberty plurality from all quarters will continue to build until a critical mass is achieved and the peace-and-liberty cluster coalesces inside a new political party with a plurality sufficient to displace the decrepit Republican Party or force what’s left of it to merge into a single New Democrat Party reminiscent of New Labour in England. In other words, the Grand Old Party is over; we’re just waiting for the Fat Lady to sing God Bless America one last time.